Friday 16 June 2023

Woodward tackles Simonides

Two more versions from one of my favourite translators, G. R. Woodward, a retired vicar and small-press aficionado with a great reputation in writing and collecting carols. These are from his Epigrammata Heroica of 1929, produced in a typicaly tiny print-run of 120 hand-numbered copies. The first poem is for the Athenian dead in the great joint Greek land victory at Plataea; the second is the most famous epigram ever written, for Leonidas and his 300 Spartans at Thermopylae the year before.

For Woodward's version of 16.26, the Dirphys epitaph, see this older blog post.
 

7.253

In noble death if Virtue's acme lies,
To us, of all men, Fortune gave the prize:
For, keen to robe thee, Greece, in Freedom's vest
Endow'd with ageless glory, here we rest.

7.249
Stranger, to the Spartans! saying,
Here we lie, their words obeying.




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